Debating the European Union: dynamics of argumentation in political debates

This thesis is a discursive investigation of contested political discourse. Using Discursive Psychology, I analyse broadcast political debates on the European Union to explore how politicians advocate and defend their political positions in an argumentative context of justification and criticism. Past research in social psychology and cognate disciplines has investigated ideology from a multitude of views. Following a move away from mainstream approaches I demonstrate how some qualitative approaches treat it as a live matter in broadcast political debates. For my data I have chosen the controversial political battleground that is the European Union and what it means for Britain. The contribution of Discursive Psychology comes in highlighting the contested, rhetorical, nature of ideology . In this thesis I draw upon Discursive Psychology to explore how this contestation unfolds as situated practice in multi-party conversations about the EU. Politicians will argue in favour or against the EU, often on the grounds of what the implication is for Britain. In this thesis I argue that Discursive Psychology is best equipped to allow us to study this as an activity; an observable, and contextual, social action. The analytical chapters focus on three interrelated aspects of political argumentation: the construction and use of factual claims (including demonstrations of knowledge statuses ) and counterclaims, the role of overlapping talk, and the function of laughter and derision. The first analytical chapter seeks to elucidate some of the ways in which facts and situated knowledge displays of them are oriented to as an argumentative matter and how they can be challenged. The second analytic chapter illustrates the role played by overlapping talk and challenges in managing the argument at hand. The last analytic chapter focuses on the accomplishment of derision in broadcast political debates, particularly on how derision can be used as form of counterclaim. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates the usefulness of Discursive Psychology in understanding the discursive dynamics of mobilisation, contestation, and defence of contrasting viewpoints in the service of political argumentation. Discursive Psychology can help social psychologists get a much deeper appreciation of the situated, and discursively dynamic, nature of political argumentation and conflict in talk

Rhetoric of derisive laughter in political debates on the EU

This paper focuses on the argumentative role of derisive laughter in broadcast political debates. Using Discursive Psychology (DP) we analyse how politicians use derisive laughter as an argumentative resource in multi-party interactions, in the form of debates about the UK and the European Union. Specifically, we explore how both pro- and anti-EU politicians use derisive laughter to manage issues of who-knows-what and who-knows-better. We demonstrate the uses of derisive laughter by focusing on two discrete, yet pervasive, interactional phenomena in our data – extended laughter sequences and snorts. We argue that in the context of political debates derisive laughter does more than signal trouble and communicate contempt; it is, more than often, mobilized in the service of ideological argumentation and used as a form of challenge to factual claims

A limit result for a system of particles in random environment

We consider an infinite system of particles in one dimension, each particle performs independant Sinai's random walk in random environment. Considering an instant $t$, large enough, we prove a result in probability showing that the particles are trapped in the neighborhood of well defined points of the lattice depending on the random environment the time $t$ and the starting point of the particles.Comment: 11 page

Convergence of nonlocal threshold dynamics approximations to front propagation

In this note we prove that appropriately scaled threshold dynamics-type algorithms corresponding to the fractional Laplacian of order $\alpha \in (0,2)$ converge to moving fronts. When $\alpha \geqq 1$ the resulting interface moves by weighted mean curvature, while for $\alpha <1$ the normal velocity is nonlocal of ``fractional-type.'' The results easily extend to general nonlocal anisotropic threshold dynamics schemes.Comment: 19 page

Non-equilibrium phase transitions in one-dimensional kinetic Ising models

A family of nonequilibrium kinetic Ising models, introduced earlier, evolving under the competing effect of spin flips at {\it zero temperature} and nearest neighbour random spin exchanges is further investigated here. By increasing the range of spin exchanges and/or their strength the nature of the phase transition 'Ising-to-active' becomes of (dynamic) mean-field type and a first order tricitical point is located at the Glauber ($\delta=0$) limit. Corrections to mean-field theory are evaluated up to sixth order in a cluster approximation and found to give good results concerning the phase boundary and the critical exponent $\beta$ of the order parameter which is obtained as $\beta\simeq1.0$.Comment: 15 pages, revtex file, figures available at request from [email protected] in postscript format, submitted to J.Phys.

Anomalous tag diffusion in the asymmetric exclusion model with particles of arbitrary sizes

Anomalous behavior of correlation functions of tagged particles are studied in generalizations of the one dimensional asymmetric exclusion problem. In these generalized models the range of the hard-core interactions are changed and the restriction of relative ordering of the particles is partially brocken. The models probing these effects are those of biased diffusion of particles having size S=0,1,2,..., or an effective negative "size" S=-1,-2,..., in units of lattice space. Our numerical simulations show that irrespective of the range of the hard-core potential, as long some relative ordering of particles are kept, we find suitable sliding-tag correlation functions whose fluctuations growth with time anomalously slow ($t^{{1/3}}$), when compared with the normal diffusive behavior ($t^{{1/2}}$). These results indicate that the critical behavior of these stochastic models are in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class. Moreover a previous Bethe-ansatz calculation of the dynamical critical exponent $z$, for size $S \geq 0$ particles is extended to the case $S<0$ and the KPZ result $z=3/2$ is predicted for all values of $S \in {Z}$.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Calibration of the Particle Density in Cellular-Automaton Models for Traffic Flow

We introduce density dependence of the cell size in cellular-automaton models for traffic flow, which allows a more precise correspondence between real-world phenomena and what observed in simulation. Also, we give an explicit calibration of the particle density particularly for the asymmetric simple exclusion process with some update rules. We thus find that the present method is valid in that it reproduces a realistic flow-density diagram.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figure

Nature of the band gap of In2O3 revealed by first-principles calculations and x-ray spectroscopy

Bulk and surface sensitive x-ray spectroscopic techniques are applied in tandem to show that the valence band edge for In2O3 is found significantly closer to the bottom of the conduction band than expected on the basis of the widely quoted bulk band gap of 3.75 eV. First-principles theory shows that the upper valence bands of In2O3 exhibit a small dispersion and the conduction band minimum is positioned at Gamma. However, direct optical transitions give a minimal dipole intensity until 0.8 eV below the valence band maximum. The results set an upper limit on the fundamental band gap of 2.9 eV

Exact Tagged Particle Correlations in the Random Average Process

We study analytically the correlations between the positions of tagged particles in the random average process, an interacting particle system in one dimension. We show that in the steady state the mean squared auto-fluctuation of a tracer particle grows subdiffusively as $sigma^2(t) ~ t^{1/2}$ for large time t in the absence of external bias, but grows diffusively $sigma^2(t) ~ t$ in the presence of a nonzero bias. The prefactors of the subdiffusive and diffusive growths as well as the universal scaling function describing the crossover between them are computed exactly. We also compute $sigma_r^2(t)$, the mean squared fluctuation in the position difference of two tagged particles separated by a fixed tag shift r in the steady state and show that the external bias has a dramatic effect in the time dependence of $sigma_r^2(t)$. For fixed r, $sigma_r^2(t)$ increases monotonically with t in absence of bias but has a non-monotonic dependence on t in presence of bias. Similarities and differences with the simple exclusion process are also discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, revte